UIDAI Offer Facility To Check Mobile – Aadhaar Linkage by 15 March

All the telecom operators have received instruction from the UIDAI (Unique Identification Authority of India) to provide the customers with the facility to track the status of their mobile SIM which are linked to the Aadhaar number, a step to guard against any unauthorized linking.

This decision is the result of some fraudulence which some retailers and agents of telecom companies allegedly misusing Aadhaar authentication facility to issue new SIMs or to re – verify mobile numbers other than that of the Aadhaar holders. It has instructed the operators to have “sufficient supervision” in order to avoid any unauthorized authentication transactions.

In order, for people to know which mobile number is linked to Aadhaar, all telecom operators have been asked to provide this service to their customers by March 15

says UIDAI CEO.

So, the telecom operators are required to come up with a mechanism which includes SMS – based facility that will both allow the subscribers to check whether their mobile number is linked with 12 digit unique identification numbers and also be informed about other mobile numbers issued or verified against their Aadhaar number.

The services will be provided to the customers through channels such as customer care number, email, web portal, SMS or app to report any unauthorised mobile number linked with their Aadhaar number.

According to the sources

instances had come to UIDAI’s notice where multiple successful authentication transactions were being performed under the guise of failed authentication and the same was being misused for issuing new mobile SIMs or reverifying subscribers other than the Aadhaar number holder.

One of the official of UIDAI recently also stated that

In light of the above, the telecom service providers are hereby directed to immediately take note of such misuse and curb the malpractices.

So far more than 1.2 billion residents have already enrolled for the Aadhaar – the unique 12 digit number which is backed by the fingerprints, iris scans, and certain other demographic details and this flagship programme by the government is considered to be the world’s largest biometric database.

Aadhaar has been made mandatory for almost all the other government official documents.